By Kerry Stevison

Twelve teenagers from the Youth Exploring Science (YES) Program at the Saint Louis Science Center are using their citizen science projects to learn more about climate change in their own area. The teens were recruited for the YES Program from various community groups in St. Louis that work with underserved populations. Once in the program, the teens choose a component and get to work using science to benefit themselves and society. Those working on the climate change project are studying the effects on frogs and butterflies.

Frogs, especially, are suffering around the globe right now. Climate change is affecting them in three ways: by altering the timing of their calls in spring (Gibbs and Breisch, 2001), by causing ponds in some areas to dry up (McMenamin et al., 2008), and by aiding the global spread of the lethal chytrid fungus (Pounds et al., 2006). These problems compound the already precipitous amphibian declines around the world.

The teens make trips to a nearby pond on Saturday evenings during the spring and record frog calls. Their data is entered into FrogWatch, a nationwide database for frog research. After three years of gathering data, they will analyze their results. The teens also spread the word about climate change through activities in the Saint Louis Science Center, summer programs for children, and even a professional development workshop for teachers.

You can learn more about FrogWatch by visiting their Website.

Kerry Stevison is a senior educator at the Saint Louis Science Center, St. Louis, Missouri.

1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius? Life or death for Tuvalu?

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele (cc photo by Greenweek2009)

Ian Fry, the delegate from Tuvalu (a small island state in the Pacific Ocean), had a voice broken by emotion in the COP15 Plenary room Saturday morning when he pleaded for his country’s proposal for a Copenhagen legally-binding agreement limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial. “The fate of my country lies in your hands”, he said. The plenary room was suspended to his words. Every normal human being had to be moved. At least I was. Is climate science providing a basis for this emotion? Should the world accept a 2°C rise, a value which seems gaining ground, or is 1.5°C, now advocated by the Alliance of Small Island States and many developing countries, a better target? Does the IPCC provide useful information on this question?

We all know (at least those who understand the scientific methods) that the burning of massive quantities of fossil fuels has destabilized the carbon cycle, since we are emitting every year approximately 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide more than what ecosystems and oceans can absorb. These contribute to thicken the layer of heat-trapping gases around the Earth, and warm its climate. The average warming over the last 100 years is of the order of 0.8°C, and has been called “unequivocal” by IPCC in its last report (www.ipcc.ch). After assessing hundreds of articles, the IPCC concluded that most of the observed increase in global temperatures since 1950 is very likely due to the observed increase in human greenhouse gas concentrations. If emissions continue unabated, global temperatures are likely to rise between 1.6 and 6.9°C above pre-industrial before the end of this century (except noted otherwise, all warming or sea-level increase values given below will be expressed with respect to the pre-industrial values.)

The physics behind this is extremely solid, and those who are not convinced either have not read the IPCC reports in good faith, or are blinded by the short-term interests they defend.

Climate warming over the last three decades has likely already had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems. It is likely that the summer 2003 European heat wave (70000 additional deaths over the summer) and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were both intensified to some extent by warming. But these are nothing compared to the impacts in store. In the future, human health, many ecosystems (both terrestrial and marine), water resources, agriculture, and low-lying coastal systems are likely to be especially affected by climate change. This is true also for small islands, where there is high exposure of population and infrastructure to sea level rise.

The UN Framework Climate Convention, adopted in 1992, states in its Article 2 that its ultimate objective is to “… prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The first policymakers who gave a quantitative interpretation to this article are the European Council of Ministers, who decided, in June 1996 that, in order to avoid this “dangerous interference”, we should never allow a global warming that exeeds 2°C above pre-industrial. This was decided 13 years ago, on the basis of the second IPCC Assessment Report.

The Third IPCC Report, published in 2001, contained the “burning embers” diagram synthesising the severity of risk associated with five “reasons for concern” (RFC) in function of the global temperature increase, using a colour scheme easy to understand: a graduation from white (low risk) to yellow (significant risk) to red (severe risk). In retrospect, it kind of justified the political choice made by the EU leaders in 1996: the transition between the yellow (significant risk) and red (severe risk) zones was located for the first two RFCs around 2°C (about 1.5°C above the 1990 temperature).

The last IPCC report (2007) contained an updated assessment of these RFCs, and an updated diagram was published in 2009 by PNAS (look for Smith et al. on www.pnas.org or on www.climate.be/vanyp ). This diagram clearly shows that the red zones are entered in at a lower warming threshold than in the 2001 version for each RFC. The downward movement is by at least 0.5°C. In other words, the 2°C threshold that could be considered somewhat “safe” on the basis of the 2001 report urgently needs a political update. My guess is that if the same European Ministers who decided, thirteen years ago, that the target ought to be 2°C would look at the evidence in the last IPC C report, they would have to conclude that a lower target, probably 1.5°C, is warranted. Please note that when I say this, I am not policy-prescriptive, I only highlight the evolution of knowledge that has taken place over the past 13 years, and suggest that using the same criteria they used in 1996, those Ministers would likely pick a lower target. I hope this is policy relevant.

Another way to look at the same issue, to understand the 1.5 versus 2°C debate, is to check what the IPCC writes about sea level changes for a 2°C warming. For a 2 to 2.4°C warming, the last IPCC report gives a sea-level increase at equilibrium of the order of 0.4 – 1.4 metres above the pre-industrial level for water thermal expansion only, but did not give a total estimate. A total number should take into account, in addition to water expansion, the melting of glaciers and small ice caps, and more important, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Glaciers and small ice caps contain the equivalent of 15 to 37 cm of sea-level increase, and have started to melt already. The Greenland represents 7 metres, and Antarctica 56 metres of sea-level rise. Given that the threshold for the long-term viability of the Greenland ice sheet has been assessed to be between 1.9 and 4.6°C global warming, and noting the uncertainty about the long-term sea level contribution from Antarctica (Oppenheimer and Alley have suggested in 2005 that a sustained global warming of 2.5°C would be a threshold beyond which there would be a commitment to a large sea level contribution from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but there is no consensus on this value), one can easily understand why Tuvalu and Small Island States are concerned: 2°C means ultimately at least 40 cm from thermal expansion, plus at (the very) least 10 cm from the melting of glaciers, plus potentially 7 metres from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, plus some contribution from Antarctica!

Tuvalu’s highest point, Ian Fry told the Plenary, is less than 4 metres, with its entire population living at less than 2 metres above sea level.

One can therefore understand why choosing 1.5 or 2°C for the ultimate goal matters for him, and why he was crying Saturday morning, preparing his intervention for the COP Plenary.

There are many other reasons why a 2°C world might not be so safe after all. The last IPCC report also contains these sentences, which I find terrible: “Approximately 20 to 30% of [plant and animal] species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if warming exceeds 2 to 3°C”. Those species don’t have a Ian Fry to speak on their behalf, but wouldn’t the fate of our human species be better, wherever we live, if these other species, who provide so many ecosystem services, were allowed to survive?

I rediscovered an old book the other day. It is the report written by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos in preparation of the 1972 UN Conference on environment, in Stockholm. It contained these visionary sentences: “The increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the air means that, at the present rates of use, the earth’s temperature could rise by 0.5°C by the year 2000.” (Well, this is precisely what happened.) and: “We [need to] wonder whether the sum of all likely fossil fuel demands in the early decades of the [21st] century might not greatly increase the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere and by doing so bring up average surface temperature uncomfortably close to that rise of 2°C which might set in motion the long-term warming-up of the planet.”

So, the science disputed by some today was already so clear 37 years ago!

We should remember the title of that visionary 1972 report (and revisit the numbers it contains, on the basis of the latest science): “Only one Earth”.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is a Professor of Climatology and Environmental sciences at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and IPCC Vice-chair.

If you find all the goings on in Copenhagen to be a little confusing, you should take heart that you’re not the only one. As BBC Environmental Reporter Richard Black points out on his COP15 blog, there’s an often overwhelming flurry of activity (and acronyms) surrounding the negotiations. If you’re looking to make sense of it without spending hours studying up on the UN or climate science, Black’s blog is enormously helpful and updated daily.

Sunday is a pretty slow day at COP15 (the main site at the Bella Center is shut down until Monday) but Saturday was packed, with representatives from the 937 observer organizations here this weekend lined up for hours to pick up credentials for the NGO exhibition and side events.

cc photo by Matthew McDermott

These included organizations most of you are familiar with and some of you have worked with before – like ICLEI and 350.org – and large universities like Stanford. But because the booths were assigned free of charge to the first 200 NGOs to request one, it was a great opportunity to hear about some smaller projects, like the Ithaca College Public Opinion Poll.

A group of students from Ithaca College turned their class project into a public opinion website, with participation from nearly 1000 individuals from around the world. Among other questions, the group asked whether the conference would produce a meaningful treaty (54% were optimistic that it would) and if allowing carbon emissions to rise above 350 ppm was dangerous (though a strong majority said yes, check out this Gallup poll to see how views on the dangers of climate change vary around the world).

If the students you work with are looking for organizations to partner with or maybe just for a good example of young people doing relatively high profile work, you might encourage them to explore some of the other pages on the site, which also highlights other youth-oriented organizations participating in the conference and working on environmental issues.

Just as a reminder, you can watch the Clim’City event we’ve organized with NOAA online starting Monday at 8:15AM EST.

The UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD 2005-2014) provides a framework for enhancing and promoting active learning and innovative ways of framing the climate change issue so that it makes sense in people’s daily lives. This relates largely to the UNFCCC-COP15 agenda. Indeed, climate change is an issue which needs to be part of public awareness, learning, and education for a sustainable future so that sustainable behaviors become daily habits. The following interview of Philippe Saugier is part of DESD’s efforts to give Education for Sustainable Development experts a voice in the climate change debate. He has kindly agreed to share his interview with us.

What does climate change mean to you?

Climate change is the most blatant example of imbalance in people’s relations among themselves and with their environment, and the gravest threat to the pursuit of the human adventure on Earth. It is also, though, the greatest opportunity that has ever arisen to supplant national, economic, and identity-based interests and to build at last the mechanisms of solidarity and world governance which humanity needs, not only to preserve the environment on which it depends but also to contain its violence and cruelty. It will no longer be possible to find a way out through dominance of private interests. It will certainly not be achieved smoothly, but the imperative of survival will compel us to come up with new forms of global regulation capable of restoring the balance.

What do you expect will result from the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen, December 7-18, 2009?

From a rational point of view, at both the scientific and economic levels, the most urgent need is, of course, to reverse the GHG emission curves worldwide. However, the transition from the rational to reality, via politics, faces vertiginous obstacles. In my view, the first among them, the number one issue in Copenhagen is the matter of global justice. The industrialized West bears historical responsibility for the problem. The prerequisite for the involvement of the rest of the world is without any possible doubt the massive reduction in emissions by the most affluent fringe of the world’s population. Otherwise, the outcomes of international negotiations will always fall well short of the level of the problem – like the Kyoto Protocol which, even though it represents an important step politically, has to date been unable to counter the exponential increase in global emissions.

Is Education in general and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in particular providing answers to climate change related problems?

Just as we will not extricate ourselves from the climate impasse without world governance, we will not manage to build true world governance without drawing support from a global citizenship. In my country, France, education forged the national consciousness and identity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Education in the 21st century must now forge the global consciousness and identity. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), in its fullest sense, is the shaping of global citizens conscious of the challenges that loom over our shared future and capable of addressing them. With regard to the climate issue, in a project such as CarboSchools, young children are trained in a scientific approach to understand not only the facts of the problem but also to seek solutions. Faced with a very anxiety-provoking situation, the educational challenge is to overcome the feeling of guilt and impotence by developing critical thinking, global consciousness, and the desire and ability to take action.

Why aren’t education and awareness-raising on the agenda of the conference in Copenhagen?

My theory is that it is basically for the same reason as that which has thus far brought about the failure of the negotiations: namely, the failure to take a step back, of long-term political vision among government leaders who by definition, in their majority, have short-term mandates. With regard to the central themes of the negotiations, i.e. mitigation and adaptation, governments have great difficulty in agreeing on decisions that have a short-term cost for a long-term benefit. The problem is the same with education, which is an investment on which there is no return in five or even 10 years. Paradoxically, this difficulty in investing over the long term may also be linked to the sense of urgency, to the need to find solutions that are immediately effective and to the idea that education will not produce swift results. The most urgent of urgent needs is clearly, however, to fit short-term solutions into a movement that is far-reaching and long-term. Anyway, it is impossible to turn off the coal and petroleum taps suddenly.

If you had the opportunity to give a speech in front of the delegates in Copenhagen, what would you emphasize?

Since it is vital that the solutions be raised to the true level of the problem, and since that requires commitments not only for five-year periods, as provided for in the Kyoto Protocol, but also for 20, 30, and 50 years, I would strongly urge the delegates to the conference to now include education as one of the pillars of the agenda for the negotiations, because these long-term commitments will never be kept if society is not thoroughly prepared for them. The dominant training systems in the industrialized world have led to unsustainable development. We must now radically change them so that henceforth they will lead to sustainable development. Owing in particular to the work carried out during the United Nations Decade for Sustainable Development, we know how to undertake these transformations, and the climate change challenge is exacerbating the urgency.

At the present moment, in practically all the world’s education systems, sustainable development is still on the sidelines. We must place it in the center and, then, the very term education for sustainable development will vanish, as it will be obvious that the purpose of education, taken as a whole, in the same way as reading, writing, and numeracy skills, will be to restore and preserve the balance in people’s relations among themselves and with their environment.

Philippe Saugier designs, coordinates, and evaluates international educational projects aimed at promoting learning towards sustainability. He is currently employed by the Max Plank Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany as the EU funded Science in Society project CarboSchools coordinator. CarboSchools promotes teacher-scientist partnerships about global change research in Europe.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment sends out weekly Science for Environment Policy news alerts that are also available on its website. You can find this week’s climate change-focused alert on-line, but there were a few points I wanted to make special mention of.

Three of the six short pieces highlighted in the alert (one on uncertainty, one on framing, and one on the effect of fearful imagery) speak directly to C3’s goal of engaging the public on climate change, and largely reinforce the project’s underlying philosophy that global effects of climate change should be tied to local changes. They emphasize some of the same points as Tony Leiserowitz’s Six Americas study, suggesting that “information should be tailored to different public groups according to their beliefs and attitudes.”

“Fear is not the answer to communicating climate change” includes some advice that might be useful to those of you thinking about how to build on the powerpoint presentation Jennifer Shirk gave in Fort Worth, particularly when selecting images:

“However, [images of large and extreme impacts such as melting icesheets, visions of rising sea levels and intense heat and droughts] also tend to enhance the sense that climate change happens somewhere else, to somebody else. Some individuals react to such images with a fatalistic attitude, feeling they are unable to do anything to help. Others deny climate change, rather than experience the discomfort of its reality.

“While the dramatic images were judged to be the most personally important, they were also considered the most disempowering. Enabling imagery… were seen as least personally important, yet made people feel more able to do something about climate change.”

The article was based on work presented in the Paper “Fear Won’t Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations by O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, which doesn’t seem to be freely available online, but you can read the abstract and, if you’re so inclined, buy the entire thing here.

by David Sittenfeld

On Saturday, September 26, groups of ordinary laypeople in over 40 countries around the world will deliberate and make recommendations in the first concurrent global citizen consultation on climate policy. This project, World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) will provide public input for the upcoming December 2009 United Nations Convention on Climate Change (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark. COP15 is a convention aimed to produce an international consensus on climate policy.

The Museum of Science, Boston is hosting one of the five U.S. deliberation sites for WWViews. The program is presented in collaboration by the Science Museum, the Brookfield Institute, and Boston University’s School of Environmental Health. To date, four main areas of work have been involved in bringing this event to fruition: fundraising, recruitment and selection of a diverse and representative group of participants, meeting logistics, and networking with policymakers, media, and other stakeholders to disseminate local and global results. Now that all the participants have been selected and planning for the events is nearly complete, Museum of Science, Boston is focused on plans to disseminate results in a way in which they will be heard. As a collaborative project between IGLO and WWViews, the Museum of Science, Boston and La Cité des Science in Paris will host a transatlantic conference between top climate policymakers from the European Union and the United States Government to share recommendations of WWViews participants and to consider how those results could impact negotiations in Copenhagen.

As the host of COP15, the Danish Board of Technology (DBT), with a long-standing history of including discussions and recommendations from the public in the formulation of public policy, is organizing conversations among laypeople to provide direct input to climate policymakers. This represents a new step in the public engagement work done by science centers around the world. Rather than focusing on public understanding of scientific principles, programs like WWViews engage the public in learning about, considering, and making informed recommendations on issues and policies that directly affect them. The importance of this work is being increasingly recognized in the informal education community. On June 19, 2008, delegates at the 5th Science Centre World Congress signed a declaration that proclaimed: We will actively seek out issues related to science and society where the voices of citizens should be heard and ensure that dialogue occurs.” WWViews is more than dialogue facilitation, it provides a well-informed and standardized method for the public to comment on one of the most pressing issues of our time.

David Sittenfeld is the regional project manager for WWViews-Massachusetts and manages the Museum’s Forum program, which engages citizens, scientists, and policymakers in deliberate conversations around emerging scientific and technological issues.

This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.

by Pedro Leon Azofeifa

Although climate change has only relatively recently become a hot-button political issue, the idea that changes in the composition of our atmosphere could have serious consequences is not a new one. Around the turn of the century, Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Nobel prize winner in physics, was the first scientist to become concerned about green-house gases (GHG). Standing on the shoulders of the great French scientist Jean-Batiste Fourier, who observed that some gases absorb more heat energy than others, Arrhenius estimated the increase in air temperature if atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) were to double in concentration. He concluded that such doubling of CO2 would raise air temperatures by 9°F (5°C). Alarmed by the carbon that was unleashed by the internal combustion engine and the industrial revolution, he stated, “We are evaporating our carbon mines into the air.”

The industrial revolution transformed the way we use energy: humans, who for most of history depended on energy produced by current photosynthesis, were now living on energy produced by ancient photosynthesis: carbon, oil, and gas. The vast deposits of carbon created by ancient photosynthesis were transferred back into the atmosphere during the industrial revolution, to the tune of many gigatons (10¹²) of carbon every year. The outstanding issue is that we have removed gigatons of solid carbon, the result of years of photosynthesis, and converted it into carbon gases by burning fossil fuels, by cutting down our forests, and by emitting methane (another potent GHG, identified by Fourier) from our waste products.

Since Arrhenius time, it has become clear that the accumulation of anthropogenic (or derived from human activities) GHG is not a hypothetical problem, although over half a century went by before his concerns were resurrected. In 1957, the Scripps Oceanographic Institute hired a young scientist named Charles Keeling to establish monitoring stations in Hawaii and the Antarctic. For decades, Keeling accumulated daily records, detecting without a doubt a constant yearly increase in CO2 concentration, whose rate of increase was also increasing. Initially rates were measured at 0.7ppm (parts per million) per year, then later at 1.5 ppm/year, and currently at about 3.0 ppm/year, bringing us to a present day concentration of approximately 387ppm. If we continue with business-as-usual, then by 2050, the actual rate of increase could double the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial concentration, putting us at a concentration of around 560ppm. Remarkably, the advanced computer systems that are now used to analyze climate change have largely confirmed Arrhenius’ calculations.

The consequences of this increase in GHG have been analyzed by many scientists, including the consortium of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) of the United Nations. The IPCC predicts many catastrophic effects driven by the impact of GHG on climate patterns, ice melting, ocean life, and atmospheric transformations. These scientists have also come to understand that the climate system is very complex and subject to many inertial and feedback effects that may not always be predictable and will require continuous refinements of the climate models. At any rate, many experts propose that climate change impacts are already evident and will increasingly represent a hazard and cost to nations at risk. The effects will not be limited to changes in weather–the economic impact of climate change has been addressed by Nicolas Stern, who concluded that rapid action to address climate change now will represent immense savings.

The COP15 meeting in Copenhagen is indeed of great importance to the future of high risk territories like islands and low lying shores. The Central American Isthmus (which includes Costa Rica) is one of those high risk regions due to its proximity to the unstable Caribbean basin and the Pacific Ocean, with a newly found potential for generating storms and hurricanes. It is also a highly seismic region with much volcanic activity. It is clear that regions like ours will require mitigation and adaptation activities. Lowland regions will have to be monitored and readiness plans should be prepared and communicated.

Costa Rica has participated actively in the meetings preparing for the Copenhagen event. Carolina Mauri, an environmental lawyer, has represented the Presidential initiative, working closely with the Ministry of the Environment (MINAET) and the Ministry of Foreign Relations. During the launch of the Peace with Nature Initiative, President Oscar Arias proposed that Costa Rica become carbon-neutral by the bicentennial of independence in 2021, making ours one of the first countries to mitigate for all its anthropogenic emissions. This is a position that is simple to understand and which can, in principle, be adopted by individuals, companies, universities, cities, regions, and whole countries. Several other countries have made similar commitments to complete mitigation before the end of the century.

Of course, the success of Costa Rica in reaching this goal, which principally involves changes in its transport system, will make very little difference if all countries do not make similar commitments. The target baseline reached after human economies become de-carbonized will presumably be about 350ppm. Success in meeting this target will indeed require funding, research, innovation, and sharing of new technologies that can harness solar, wind, water, and geothermal sources. More information at www.pazconlanaturaleza.org.

Pedro Leon Azofeifa, Scientific Advisor to the President of Costa Rica – Dr. Leon, a founding member of the Costa Rica Academy of Sciences and the first Costa Rican scientist to be elected to the United States’ National Academy of Sciences.

This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.

A deal in Copenhagen cannot happen without political intervention…by you.

by Keya Chatterjee

Last week in Bonn, Germany, at a United Nations climate meeting, I had the privilege of sitting down with a small U.S. Congressional staff delegation and ambassador Masao Nakayama from Micronesia. Ambassador Nakayama, a soft spoken, distinguished man who speaks deliberately with slightly accented but otherwise perfect English, opened the meeting by making sure we understood that his people lived on low lying islands that were experiencing devastating impacts of climate change. But his main objective was to convey why this fact was so important to the United States. “Micronesia has a special relationship with the U.S.,” he told us. Apparently under the Compact with the United States, Micronesia has agreed that unless the United States was consulted, the only military that could be based in Micronesia’s territory was the U.S. military. Including water, that means that an area the size of the continental United States is now securely navigable by the U.S. military. But as islands become uninhabitable due to climate change, Micronesia’s territory (and hence U.S. military presence) will start to shrink because uninhabited islands cannot claim coastal waters as part of their territory. This means that climate change will directly impact the U.S. military’s ability to maintain a presence in the Pacific.

What made the ambassador’s testimony so surprising was that it was put in terms of what the U.S. military stood to lose, rather than focusing on what must surely be more dear to his heart–loss of lives, human suffering, and the devastation of Micronesia’s geography, cultures, and languages. He simply said, “The U.S. will benefit from our survival in military terms, so we ask for your help in assuring that our nation will survive.”

These stories always come to mind as I talk to friends here at home about whether the $0.40 per day tag of the U.S. climate legislation is too high for them…

Sadly, this testimony and others like it about the impacts of climate change happened mostly in the side meetings of the UN climate meeting in Bonn, that we were all attending. The stories that we heard every day over lunch conveyed an urgency that stood in stark contrast to the pace of the negotiations to finalize a new UN treaty in Copenhagen this December. Here in the United States, that urgency stands in even starker contrast to the pace and ambition of the US Senate in securing support for action on climate change.

That said, there has been positive movement both in the United States and internationally in the past months, and there is reason to believe that the pace of action will increase. The buzz around Copenhagen is palpable throughout the climate community, and anticipation of this global meeting has been one of the major forces driving the timetable for US Congressional action on climate change.

The pressure to deliver a climate deal in Copenhagen is also evident in the UN process. Last week’s meeting in Bonn, was the third meeting of its kind in 6 months. The formal meetings were focused on consolidating the nearly 200-page document that will need to be cut by an order of magnitude between now and Copenhagen. The process is painstakingly slow, but it is moving, and the facilitators of the sessions are starting to boil down each chapter into a readable text.

Beyond consolidating text, there were other successes at Bonn:

• More countries than ever before now accept that the outcome of Copenhagen must be a legally binding treaty
• There is increased agreement on aviation and shipping, which were left out of the Kyoto Protocol. The proposal being discussed now would both reduce greenhouse gas emissions from those sectors and raise resources to help the most vulnerable communities and ecosystems prepare for the impacts of climate change.

The positive outcomes are still too few and far between, however, and the chairs and facilitators must work to get permission to continue negotiating text changes in the next month and a half, ahead of the next meeting in Bangkok. The discussions to make the text clearer will also shed more light on some of the buried conflicts, involving things like Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), and Assigned Amount Units (AAUs).

To navigate these thorny acronyms and coded arguments, we have to rely on the political will of heads of state, finance ministers, and ministers of foreign affairs. After a side meeting about the G-20 and finance, for example, it became clear that more push is needed from political leaders in order to break the deadlock on climate finance. On the other hand, a side meeting on the topic of deforestation (which accounts for nearly 20% of global CO2 emissions) was more successful thanks to strong signals from the U.S. House of Representatives that there will be support for parties who wish to reduce deforestation dramatically. Because the U.S. Congressional support included support above and beyond ‘offsets,’ countries had confidence that their actions domestically would not reduce the amount of action happening in the United States, which was especially important.

As evidenced by our conversations with Micronesia’s ambassador, the voices of the vulnerable countries provided the most clear and compelling clarion call throughout the meeting. In the closing plenary of the meeting, Bangladesh made a plea to negotiators to shorten the negotiating text, so that a deal could be struck in December and Bangladesh could have a chance for survival.

Bangladesh’s statement was clear: The next four months will decide our place in history books and whether we can ensure the survival of the most vulnerable communities in every country of the world.

The readers of this web site all know that an international agreement that curbs emissions and prepares for climate change impacts will help our global economy and secure a better future for generations to come. In the United States, it will start to reverse the trend of larger, more devastating fires in the West, increased drought in the Southeast, and increased storm intensity on the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Finally, it will have key elements that will help us prepare for the impacts that we are already experiencing.

Those of us who understand all of this cannot afford to be silent. A deal in Copenhagen is at stake, and the future of the planet is at risk. It’s time for all of us to tell our politicians to act now, and to talk to our friends and neighbors and ask them to do the same. To paraphrase the ambassador from Micronesia: I ask for your help in assuring that the planet will survive.

Keya Chatterjee, Deputy Director, Climate Change, World Wildlife Foundation – Ms. Chatterjee is part of WWF’s climate team, working on every level to bring awareness about climate change to the public and to faciliate progress at the highest levels of government toward a new global climate treaty.

This is the most recent in a series of guest posts by leading climate scientists, science writers, policy makers and others involved in the ongoing debate about climate policy. We’ll be hearing from these guests regularly leading up to COP15 in December.

Latest U.S. Climate Assessment Flags Impacts Ongoing Today

by David Herring

Having served for more than 17 years as a science writer, editor, and public speaker for two U.S. science agencies, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to communicate effectively about science. So it is with some chagrin that I call attention to the highly effective communication campaign that various “dismissive”* entities have been waging to sow seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) among the public regarding climate change.

“FUD” is a shorthand term coined by marketers and public relations experts to refer to a particular communications strategy. It’s a strategy that is well understood and widely used to influence public opinion. Sadly, it’s a strategy that works, and we’re seeing it used a lot today in public forums about science policy topics facing our nation (consider health care insurance, stem cell research, and evolution as recent cases in point).

For practitioners of FUD, the rules of the game are simple: question everything your opponents say and seek to prove nothing. Invoke uncertainty if you can; exaggerate, obfuscate, or even outright lie if you can’t. Objectivity isn’t the objective; winning is. You win at FUD if you can prevent your opponents from successfully enacting any public policy action that would change the status quo.

Thus far, the practitioners of FUD have been winning the climate “debate.” Mind you, theirs isn’t a scientific debate; it’s a rhetorical one. And witness: no national or international public policy has been enacted to significantly address the roots of the climate change problem. Study after study on public understanding and attitudes about climate change reveal a growing majority of Americans are convinced that “climate change is real” and represents “a serious problem.” Yet there also remains a lingering, false public perception that climate scientists are “uncertain” and that there’s still some debate among scientists about what’s causing our world to warm. This is precisely the false perception fomented by the proponents of FUD.

To help to put that lingering perception to bed, please note that in June 2009 the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) issued the last in a series of 21 major climate science reports (available here: http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments). Together with the IPCC Climate Assessments, these USGCRP reports represent the best information that our nation’s best climate scientists have learned about climate change.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led the development of the latest report, titled “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States.” The authors of this report are from multiple climate science agencies and academia. The reports state that global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced. Specifically, the “Impacts” report reads: “Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.” The scientists amply cite their evidence and invite others to examine the data for themselves.

The report’s authors warn that the impacts from climate change aren’t abstract, far-off, far-in-the-future, or undefined things. On the contrary, they say, “Climate change is apparent now across our nation.” The report cites melting Arctic sea ice and permafrost, increased occurrence of wildfires, increased stress on fish populations and coral reefs, more intense heavy rain events that happen more often, rising sea levels, and larger storm surges hitting coastal communities. They cite increased risk of heat waves, increased impacts to water and energy utilities, greater adverse impacts to farmers, and increased health risks. All these documented impacts are among the mounting, mountainous scientific evidence that climate change is being observed and felt today.

At this point, some readers may speculate that I’m engaged in a FUD campaign of my own. My reply is simple: what do the scientists’ climate data show, and what explanation best fits the observations? Each and every observation published in the IPCC and USGCRP reports has been documented and verified by multiple science teams independently from one another. Because those observations line up very well with scientists’ understanding of how the climate system works, and with climate models’ predictions of past and future climate conditions, scientists are increasingly confident that they understand the main root cause of climate change: human emission of carbon dioxide. The case has been made by leading climate scientists, both in the United States and internationally.

So now the stage is set for the next match between proponents of climate science literacy and proponents of climate FUD—the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Already I can hear the propaganda machines revving their engines. I don’t know whether or not our policy leaders in Copenhagen will reach an agreement to limit humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Whichever way the climate policy negotiations go, I hope our policy leaders will give primary consideration to three important facts: (1) we have ample scientific evidence that human-induced climate changes are underway today and are projected to grow; (2) widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase; and (3) while there will be economic costs associated with any given climate policy, there will also be economic costs associated with a failure to act. Climate scientists warn that, in the long run, the economic costs of inaction will likely prove to be far greater.

In the end, I believe (I hope!) proponents of truth and scientific objectivity will prevail. But if they fail to adopt new policies to address the global warming problem, I hope our policy leaders will have the courage to admit that it’s simply because they didn’t get it done, and not because of some bogus claim of scientific uncertainty. As the late, great physicist Dr. Richard Feynman observed: “Reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.”

*My use of the term “dismissive” refers to the 7% of the U.S. population who are “very sure that global warming is not happening” and are “actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”—as measured and defined by Ed Maibach, et al., in their 2009 reported titled “Global Warming’s Six Americas.”

In March 2008 David Herring joined NOAA’s Climate Program Office, where he serves as Communications Program Director. Before coming to NOAA, David worked for 16 years as a science writer, editor, and project manager in the Earth Sciences Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.